Honoring Those Who Listened

by Capt. George
Duffy

Recently, I was prompted to
resurrect from my safe deposit box the postcards and letters received
by my mother from people who heard messages from me, a Prisoner of War,
broadcast by Japanese radio stations during World War II.

It is over 50 years since I
really looked at these -- if I ever did examine all of them. Fourteen
postcards and 21 letters containing information that I had long forgotten
or never comprehended.

I wrote my first letter to
my mother in December 1942, a few weeks after the Germans turned us over
to the Japanese on Java. It was broadcast on April 23, 1943 from Tokyo.
People throughout the United States copied it and sent it to my mother.

I wrote my second letter to
my mother early in May and it was broadcast from Batavia, Java (where
I was) on May 18, 1943, and forwarded to my family on June 23 by the Office
of the Provost Marshall General in Washington with the comment that "it
was intercepted by government facilities." Apparently only one other
person in the western world heard it.

That second letter was re-broadcast
at least twice: from Bandoeng, Java on July 14, 1943, and from Jogjakarta,
Java, on July 17. Four people heard the July 14 reading, one of whom referred
to the May 18 letter. (Strangely, he did not notify my family at the time.)
A solitary listener picked up the transmission on the 17th.

Who were those 35 dedicated
people who wrote to my family transmitting my letters?

Their letters and cards give
few clues.

The majority lived on the West
Coast: California (19), Washington (3), Oregon (2). There were two from
New York, and one each from Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska,
New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Texas, and an unknown location. I always thought
that they probably had relatives who were Missing in Action or Prisoners
of War, but only three identified themselves as such.

To
the consternation of the government, hundreds of such "ex-officio
intelligence agents" and thousands of anxious families grew into
a nationwide web of information collectors and distributors. One extremely
astute listener from Monrovia, California, correctly calculated within
one year of our capture, that there were 47 survivors from my ship on
Java; that we had been sunk on Sept. 10, 1942; that my Captain's name
was Pedersen; and so on. He even knew the date of sinking of the
SS William F. Humphrey by the same raider.

According to this gentleman,
the volatile radio personage Walter Winchell reported the FBI was investigating
persons who were relaying these messages to the families -- on the suspicion
they were spies!

[The New York Times article,
left, did not give the name of the ship, while an article published one
month later by the local Newburyport News did name the MV American Leader.]

So, instead of assisting the
distressed next-of-kin, the Government was making things difficult. The
United States Navy heard my April 23 letter, as did 30 volunteers. Almost
every one of the citizens mailed a message the same day. The Navy
finally got around to it on July 1.

The Navy was also "copied"
by the "government facility" that handled the May 18 letter,
which opened with the words: "Greetings from the island of Java."
It took the Navy until Oct. 2 to pass this message along. Not only
that, their cover letter reported me as being in the Philippines!

What instigated the unearthing
of those 56-year-old letters and postcards was an article in the August/September
1998 issue of the Disabled American Veterans magazine recounting a similar
experience by former POW Frank Davis of Stanton, Delaware. Frank,
who was badly wounded and captured during the Battle of the Bulge, found
among his late mother's effects a similar packet of letters from short-wave
radio listeners.

"It was the first time
I had laid eyes on them and it was amazing," he said.

Buoyed by his discovery, Frank
enlisted the help of United States Senators William V. Roth Jr.
and Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, who proclaimed that "it
is important to 'save' this significant portion of World War II history."

What form this recognition
will take is not yet clear, but it is a long time coming.

One of those "homefront
heroes," Sanford Lowe of 222 West 77th St., New York City, copied
and sent 10,379 messages to families of POWs, including my December
1942 letter to my mother, Mrs. Alice Duffy, 26 High St., Newburyport,
Massachusetts.

P.S. The "Skenny,"
"Fenney," etc. refers to Charles W. Feeney Jr. an electrician
aboard the MV American Leader who was killed during the attack
by the German raider Michel.

A similar version
of this story appeared in The Daily News of Newburyport, Massachusetts